This paper presents the various sources of uncertainty we encounter in our project. Our research focus lies on the investigation of language elaboration processes in Middle Low German. We are particularly interested in diachronic constructional changes and constructionalizations involving and affecting all linguistic dimensions. For this, it is necessary to annotate our corpus with Part-of-Speech and constructional tags. Here, we are confronted with gradualness, gradience, and ambiguity as potential sources of uncertainty that complicate the annotation process. Furthermore, due to the historicity of the investigated language, we expect cases of incomplete knowledge and comparative fallacy from the annotators. For this reason, we develop an interface that captures all annotators’ doubts.

In this paper, we present the annotation challenges we have encountered when working on a historical language that was undergoing elaboration processes. We especially focus on syntactic ambiguity and gradience in Middle Low German, which causes uncertainty to some extent. Since current annotation tools consider construction contexts and the dynamics of the grammaticalization only partially, we plan to extend CorA – a web-based annotation tool for historical and other non-standard language data – to capture elaboration phenomena and annotator unsureness. Moreover, we seek to interactively learn morphological as well as syntactic annotations.